Ex-Apple Man Streams Flash Onto the iPad

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Ex-Apple Man Streams Flash Onto the iPad

First, OnLive put Windows on the iPad. And now the free-thinking San Francisco startup has gone so far as to put Adobe Flash on Apple's holy tablet.

On Wednesday, the company unveiled a new version of OnLive Desktop – an iPad application that lets users access a virtual Windows desktop and Windows applications housed on servers in the proverbial cloud – and this new version includes a browser equipped with Adobe Flash. Famously, Apple doesn't allow the Flash player to run locally on the iPad, but OnLive is offering a way around the restriction.

Perlman agrees that Apple was right to shut out Flash on its mobile devices. The buggy nature of the platform wasn't worth the hassle. But, he says, "when you can run [Flash] on a full-powered computer, that equation is very different."

Previously, remote control tools such as LogMeIn allowed users to access a Flash-equipped browser running on their own Windows or Mac desktops, but OnLive apps lets users do so without using a desktop intermediary.

OnLive is just the latest venture from Steve Perlman, a serial inventor and entrepreneur most famous for building Apple's Quicktime video software and WebTV, an internet-on-your-TV contraption that was purchased by Microsoft. OnLive began by streaming games across the net to desktops, laptops, and tablets, but last month, it started streaming Windows desktops as well.

The initial version was free, but the new Flash-browser version is priced at $4.99 a month. The upgrade also gives Adobe's PDF Reader, but Perlman says the browser is a real selling point. "It's the fastest mobile browser ever," he says. "And unless you're a consumer with a gigabit connection, this is the fastest consumer browser ever.... It takes about a tenth of a second to download 15 megabytes."

Earlier this month, Wired played around with a version of the new browser at OnLive's offices in San Francisco, and according to SpeedTest.net, the service's Flash browser provided download speeds of at least 100 megabits. But results will vary when the service is exposed to the rest of the world.

The service is available to anyone. But ultimately, Perlman sees it as a tool for businesses – a way of using Windows and Windows apps without actually installing Microsoft's software on your own machines. According to Perlman, OnLive will soon introduce an "enterprise version" of the OnLive Desktop, which will offer tools that allow IT managers to control how company employees use the service.

OnLive also plans versions Desktop Plus for Android, PCs, Macs and even TVs soon, but has not revealed specific release dates.